Super Star

Daily Archives: October 17, 2013

An enlargement of the Westerlund cluster of stars from the original image, linked below. Credit: ESO

The star at the heart of this story is called Westerlund 1-26 or just W 26, it is about the biggest star we know of in our galaxy. It is some 1,500 + times the size of our sun! As the press release below tells, the star is in the process of dying, surly to become a black hole.

The star W 26 is part of a cluster of stars especially notable because of the large number of very massive stars.

The cluster was discovered in 1961 by Bengt Westerlund. The cluster was difficult to study for a long time because of dust and gas clouds and is one of the reasons distance estimates vary so much, last estimate I saw was a little over 4,900 pc, or around 16,000-light years.

The problem of the gas and dust doesn’t seem to be much of a problem for a very amazing telescope the VLT Survey Telescope. If the telescope isn’t cool enough, the camera on it, the OmegaCAM is incredible!

This new picture from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory shows the remarkable super star cluster Westerlund 1 (eso1034). This exceptionally bright cluster lies about 16 000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Ara (The Altar). It contains hundreds of very massive and brilliant stars, all of which are just a few million years old — babies by stellar standards. But our view of this cluster is hampered by gas and dust that prevents most of the visible light from the cluster’s stars from getting to Earth.